


Half-off! at the Register

by phresine



Category: Code Geass
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-16
Updated: 2019-06-16
Packaged: 2020-05-13 05:11:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,973
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19244515
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/phresine/pseuds/phresine
Summary: “I love grocery shopping,” said Lelouch never.





	Half-off! at the Register

**Author's Note:**

> ‘Lelouch of the Half-Price’ (半額のルルーシュ, play on how half-price, _hangaku_ sounds similar to rebellion, _hangyaku_ ) was trending on twitter because there was/is a collab event with the mobile game, Granblue, as well as a half-off campaign in-game.
> 
> So here’s an early-R2 fic set at the supermarket.

An incomplete list, in no particular order, of the various ways Charles zi Britannia’s existence inconvenienced Lelouch:

1\. Taking away Nunnally.

2\. But not taking away C.C.’s assorted wardrobe of frilled clothing because whichever cursed sods had come to ransack Lelouch’s rooms of any sign of his past life and Nunally had clearly assumed he had some kind of fondness for them (the jury: undecided).

3\. Rewriting Lelouch’s memories and all of those around him to replace Nunally with Rolo.

4\. In a slipshod attempt to make sense of a life without Nunnally, a life which could never make sense at all, hamfistedly plastering over the gaping holes in Lelouch’s memories with new memories that made little to no sense.

And so it was that Lelouch found himself on a Saturday morning in a sprawling supermarket an ambling fifteen minute walk from Ashford Academy, shopping trolley before him, and Rolo by his side, eyes shining, with the discomfort at the back of his head insisting that grocery shopping was a joyful, weekly experience when Lelouch knew it was _no such thing_.

Lelouch seethed internally, staring at the assorted capsicums with a bland smile on his face, conscious of the constant surveillance that was his life. Already, the constant background level chatter and music was starting to give him a headache. _I should be plotting the overthrow of the Britannian government._

“I’d like red peppers!” Rolo said cheerfully.

 _Red, like all the blood you’ve shed, you murderous child,_ Lelouch thought, without a single scrap of irony. Outwardly, he maintained his smile, and chided gently, “Don’t think you can get out of eating the green and yellow capsicums, too. They all have different nutrients, very important for a growing boy.”

Rolo, who had clearly never learnt how to accept any kindness, however fake, in an instant turned red and splotchy with gratitude, then disbelief, before not quite settling into the appropriate look of sulkiness appropriate for the situation.

“Yes, brother!” he said, with slightly too much emphasis on _brother_ , already looking like he might burst into tears.

They were still in the produce section. They’d not even made it to the aisles.

Lelouch anticipated a very long shopping trip ahead.

He eyes the contents of the trolley, a sparse but respectable assortment of capsicum, pumpkin, and asparagus, and decided to cut his losses by gently ushering Rolo towards the baked goods. “What would you like for breakfast this week?” he asked, and instantly realised his mistake.

Rolo, when required, was a very efficient little killing machine. He could analyse camera blind spots within five minutes of being handed a set of blueprints, calculate to the half-second how long he could maintain his geass before his heart gave out, determine the cleanest route of escape.

But when faced with a decision to make for himself, he dithered worse than Schneizel at his wardrobe before an evening soirée.

“Um,” Rolo said weakly, staring at the first row of many of bagged croissants and eclairs and rolls. “Can I have cereal instead?”

Nunnally never ate cereal. “These have less sugar,” Lelouch lied. He pressed a finger to his temple. The incessant buzzing of the supermarket seemed to be getting louder.

Rolo, in a show of human emotion that always seemed to be entirely too studied yet genuine, all at the same time, leaned in and said worriedly, “Brother, are you okay?”

Lelouch dropped his hand. “Yes, of course.” He gently nudged the trolley — the supermarket really was getting louder and louder — and started for the next aisle. “I think they had some brioche in the other week,” he said.

The next aisle did not have any brioche. It did have a trio of Knight of Rounds, Suzaku standing front and center, skin sallow and hair glistening sickly in the fluorescent supermarket lighting.

On the one hand, Lelouch had found the source of all the noise.

On the other hand, Lelouch would have had much rather preferred finding the brioche.

—

“It is a Saturday! And Maldini told me Prince Schneizel said he wouldn’t have need of us today!” Gino careered into the Lancelot’s hanger with all the Tristan’s speed, but with none of the Tristan’s grace, Anya following at a more sedate pace behind him, nose burrowed in her commlink. “Time to go to school!”

Gino, Suzaku noted with some concern, had already dressed himself up in the Ashford school uniform, and press ganged Anya into doing the same. “Students don’t go to school on Saturdays,” Suzaku said gently.

Gino’s face didn’t so much as fall as collapse into a look of pure confusion. “No school... on Saturdays?”

“No. They have weekends off,” Suzaku explained.

Gino’s face brightened again “Weekends! I’ve heard of them!” he said excitedly, and Suzaku belatedly remembered Gino had only ever had a life of utter ease or completely at the beck and call of the military, and never anything resembling an ordinary existence in between, and the distinction to weekdays and weekends was utterly foreign to him. “They’re what, Wednesdays and Fridays?”

Anya raised her head. “Saturdays and Sundays.”

“Well, at least I got the ‘days’ bit right,” said Gino, not sounding the least bit discouraged. “Wait, what’s a ‘hump day’, then?”

“Wednesdays,” said Suzaku.

Gino was consulting his commlink, fingers flying across the keys. “And ‘weekdays’?”

“Mondays, Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays,” Anya recited as though she had been forced by her tutor to learn them by rote, like others would learn a foreign language.

“So how can Wednesday be a ‘weekday’ _and_ a ‘hump day’?”

 _English is not my first language,_ thought Suzaku. “That’s a good question.”

He thought he heard a slight scoffing noise from Lloyd, who was busily doing who knew what at his workstation. Possibly calculating how much of Cecile’s cooking he could offload onto their visitors while she was off inside the Lancelot running system checks, judging by how he was eyeing Gino hungrily.

“Also!” said Gino, who had clearly had his second thought for the day. “What about last week, when you went to Ashford in the evening. That was definitely on a Saturday!”

Oh, that? Just dropping by the surveillance room, a completely normal room to have in a school, by the way, to spy on the childhood best friend I betrayed after finding out he had a hand in destroying my — everything.

“I forgot about E.U.-Japan time differences,” Suzaku lied.

Even Gino looked somewhat sceptical.

“My lords and lady,” Lloyd interjected, with a certain twist in his voice that clearly indicated that while he may have thought of Anya as a lady, he didn’t think much of Suzaku and Gino as lords. “If you insist on being in my hanger, than I must insist that you bring me food.”

Gino looked pointedly at the assorted rainbow of cold noodles scattered about the hanger, coloured with everything from the benign (squid ink), to creative (gummy bears), to less than advisable (sea urchins). “I think you have plenty of food.”

“I am allergic to gluten,” Lloyd lied brazenly.

Which partly explained why Suzaku was in a supermarket on a Saturday with Gina and Anya, staring dumbly over a trolley of vegetables at Lelouch and Rolo while they stared dumbly back, but it didn’t explain everything. Namely:

“Why are you all in school uniform?” asked Rolo.

“I wanted to experience how commoners live!” Gino said excitedly. “These are my commoner clothes!”

“I only brought my uniforms with me from Britannia,” Suzaku said. And flightsuits were not acceptable day wear.

“Then what do you wear to sleep?” asked Rolo.

“Suzaku sleeps in the nude,” said Anya.

“And how do you know that?” Lelouch asked, eyebrows raised high.

“Anya, no. Please, no,” Suzaku told Anya hastily, even as she was raising her commlink. To Lelouch and Rolo, he gave a warm, if distracted, and very, very faked, “It’s good to see you,” before turning to his current main cause of concern, and asked of Gino, “What is gluten-free bread?”

“I don’t know,” Gino said. “Lord Asplund said he had a gluten allergy, right? So we should be looking for gluten-free items. Like gluten-free bread, or gluten-free milk, or gluten-free cheese.”

“Would you like some help?” Lelouch said kindly, almost pityingly.

“Yes!” Gino said instantly. “We’re looking for food for Lord Asplund. But it can’t have gluten. What can we buy that doesn’t have gluten in it?”

Lelouch turned his head and gazed out over the supermarket. Which, given that it was a supermarket, and therefore built with high aisles, really meant that he was eying the eye-level pita bread. “That’s a very wide net,” Lelouch said finally. “For Lord Asplund, you said? What kind of food does this Lord Asplund like?”

Gino and Anya looked at Suzaku expectantly. “Uh,” said Suzaku, who knew more about what foods Lloyd _didn’t_ like, i.e. anything produced by Cecile. “Edible food?” Suzaku tried, and was met with a resounding silence that was helpful if only to underscore how utterly unhelpful his answer had been. After some soul-searching, Suzaku managed, “I think he likes puddings.”

“What kind of puddings,” Lelouch wanted to know. “Bread puddings? Christmas puddings? Puddings that are baked, or puddings that are chilled and set in the fridge? Sweet? Savoury? With raisins, or without?”

“...edible puddings,” Suzaku answered weakly.

“What about the small, yellow ones?” said Gino. “Like jelly. But not like jelly. What are they called?”

“Caramel flans?” asked Lelouch. “They’re over in the open refrigerator section.”

“Be right back!” Gino said instantly, and went tearing off.

In the sudden silence, Suzaku shifted on his feet, and contemplated how his life had come to be that he was standing in a supermarket with his forcibly amnesiac ex-childhood best friend who once and possibly still moonlighted as a terrorist, a child assassin, and Anya, who, actually, taking into account her career as a Knight of Rounds, was responsible for more deaths than the rest of them combined, come to think of it.

“Have you finished the essay due tomorrow for social studies?” asked Lelouch, clearly fishing for a subject.

“There was an essay due?” Suzaku asked back, startled. He foresaw more remedial classes in his future. “No. Have you?”

“No,” Lelouch said succinctly, and fell silent.

Anya was busy tapping at her commlink. Rolo fussed at his, playing with the delicate green locket that hung from it by a thin, gold chain. Lelouch stared at the pita bread again, apparently lost in thought.

Suzaku stared at Lelouch. Why had Lelouch not finished his coursework? Was he spending his time outside school gambling, again? Doting on his not-sibling? Had his memories returned, and was he spending his time as Zero when he should have been writing three pages on whatever colony they were supposed to be studying in class? What were they meant to be studying in class this week, anyway, and how was he meant to fulfill Euphie’s dreams of attending school while he was busy trying to work out if he was doing too little or too much to avenge her murderer? These were the questions that plagued Suzaku’s life.

Five minutes passed. “Has Lord Weinberg… gotten lost?” Rolo raised hesitantly.

Suzaku reached for his commlink. A complete lack of reception bars shone on his screen mockingly. “We should go find him.”

“Should we split up?” asked Anya.

“I’ll take Rolo,” Suzaku said quickly.

Rolo’s head whipped towards Lelouch, and Suzaku felt his eyes narrow. Lelouch gave Suzaku an inscrutable look, and shrugged. “We’ll stay here in case Lord Weinberg comes back.”

“Okay,” said Suzaku, and strode off, Rolo a very reluctant shadow.

There was no sign of Gino in the rest of the baked goods section. Or the deli. Or in the condiments aisle. Suzaku asked, “Has Lelouch been treating you well?”

“Yes, my Lord,” Rolo answered instantly. “Like a brother.”

Rolo was still rolling his locket between his fingers.

“And what does he do outside of class?” Suzaku pursued relentlessly.

“Um,” Rolo said, clearly thrown by how Suzaku had asked the same questions a scant week ago. “Oh! Last night he helped me do my math homework.”

“Did he do his own homework?”

Rolo furrowed his brow. “No?”

Doesn’t do his homework, spends his time in class sleeping, and still only has about half as many remedial classes as me, Suzaku thought.

“But he really spent a lot of time helping me last night, we’re doing quadratics in class and…” Rolo’s voice trailed off.

They’d reached the breakfast aisle. Suzaku followed Rolo’s gaze to a multicolored box that proclaimed to contain, “lucky charms”, even though Suzaku didn’t see a single daruma or votive tablet illustrated on it. “Rolo?”

“Oh! It’s… nothing, my Lord.” Rolo fidgeted under Suzaku’s gaze, and said, “Ah, well. I’ve heard about them from my classmates, but Lelouch doesn’t like buying cereal…”

There were shopping baskets stacked at the end of the aisle. Suzaku went and took a basket, and put in a box of the cereal Rolo had been looking at. After some consideration, Suzaku added a second box in chocolate, and then a third in frosted.

Rolo was staring at him, wide-eyed.

“We did interrupt your grocery trip,” Suzaku explained. “It’s only fair.”

“Thank you, my Lord,” Rolo said quietly.

—

Meanwhile, in the baked goods section:

“What about this one?” Anya held up her commlink. On the screen was a photo of what looked to be Lelouch at age seven, lying in some grassy fields, flowers adorning his hair.

“I don’t recognise that photo,” Lelouch lied, using every scrap of what he’d learnt at his mother’s knee to keep his features calm and distant, even as his inner monologue shrieked in discomfort about how Anya had a series of photos of him sleeping as a child.

“What about —”

“Lady Alstreim,” Lelouch interrupted, somewhat desperately. “Do you have any pictures of… Arthur?”

There, a nice, safe topic. And as it turned out, Anya did have a veritable library of photos of Arthur biting Suzaku, Arthur running away from Suzaku, Arthur scratching Suzaku across the face… Suzaku was in his Knight of Rounds uniform for all of them, and Lelouch could not help but notice he didn’t have a single smile in a single photo that reached his eyes.

“These are lovely photos,” Lelouch said, somewhat dubiously.

“I have more,” Anya said, and they were halfway through a set of photos themed around Arthur sleeping in increasingly uncomfortable positions on the Lancelot when Suzaku and Rolo returned.

“Is that cereal?” asked Lelouch, zeroing in on the basket on Suzaku’s arm. “Rolo, did you ask Suzaku to buy you cereal?”

“We couldn’t find Gino.” Suzaku ignored Lelouch’s question. Rolo looked sheepish.

Lelouch really, really should have been spending his time planning how to overthrow Britannia, while still saving Nunnally. “Suzaku, with me,” Lelouch said briskly. “Rolo and Anya, wait here, and do _not_ get lost.”

Suzaku hesitated.

Lelouch softened his expression and extended a hand. “Together, you and I can do anything… remember?” and only too late remembered that he wasn’t supposed to be remembering anything at all, not really.

But it worked. Suzaku gave a small, startled smile, and nodded.

“Where did you check?” Lelouch said as they went past the aisles at a brisk walk. “The dairy section?”

“Yes.”

“Snacks?”

“Yes.”

“Meat?”

“Yes.”

“Liquor?”

“Liquor? But Gino’s... too young to drink...” said Suzaku.

Gino was standing in front of the wine selection.

Suzaku said, with resignation in his voice, “Gino.”

“Suzaku!” Gino said. “I found the puddings!” Two laden baskets sat at his feet.

“And the confectionaries,” said Lelouch. He peered into Gino’s basket. “Does that candy say, ‘Rolo’?”

“Guess what else I found!” Gino said excitedly. “Wine! But in boxes! Commoners are so innovative. The wine cellar back home would have been way easier to organize if everything were in boxes.”

“Sirs,” said a store clerk hovering nearby, “I need to see some ID.”

“What? Oh, sure,” said Gino, and Lelouch was treated to seeing the store clerk turn alarmingly pale when he released he was facing not one, but two Knights of Round.

—

The final tally at the cash registers:

Suzaku’s basket: three boxes of cereal (original, chocolate, and frosted), for Rolo; one pack of kitty treats, for Arthur; two packs of dog treats, for Arthur.

Lelouch’s trolley: capsicum; pumpkin; asparagus; sandwich bread; dinner rolls; trout; ham; capers; cheese; a single roll of Rolo (the candy, not the child).

Gino’s basket(s): two cartons of boxed wine (one red, one white); five different types of caramel flan, three each; three rolls of Rolo (again, the candy, not the child); a packet of lemon sherbets; a packet of liquorice twists; a packet of caramel toffees; and a single apple.

Rolo: nothing.

Anya: an orange.

In the parking lot, Lelouch watched Gino load a shiny sports car and asked, “Does he have a license for that?”

Suzaku took a little too long to consider before answering, “He has an operator’s license for Knightmare Frames generations five to current, and a pilot’s license for attack fighter class aircraft.”

“Does he have a _driver’s_ license for _that_ particular vehicle?”

“...I’m not sure.”

Gino slammed the boot shut with an air of great satisfaction. The boot popped back up, ever so slightly, and dribbled out a shopping bag of puddings.

“Milly’s pleased that you’ve been stationed at Area 11,” said Lelouch, as Gino and Rolo scrambled to pick up the puddings before they rolled away under car wheels. Anya was taking photos. “She’s looking forward to seeing more of you around.”

Suzaku had a distant look in his eyes as he watched Gino and Rolo unanimously determine that the boot was too full for any more groceries, and started stacking puddings in the glovebox. “I’m looking forward to being around more often, too.”

**Author's Note:**

> Bonus: [the sequel](https://mobile.twitter.com/timmy_tortilla/status/1139742760674533376).


End file.
